All Climate Events

Thursday, April 11, 2019. 2:00PM. Advancing modeling capabilities to improve prediction of extreme weather events in the Northeastern United States. Isaac Ginis, University of Rhode Island. Sponsored by NOAA GFDL. More information here.

The Northeast U.S. coast experiences infrequent, high-impact landfalling hurricanes and nor’easters with complex storm characteristics. We are developing a modeling system to predict the consequences of coastal and inland hazards associated with these extreme storms in order to better prepare coastal communities for future risks. Our modeling approach adds new capabilities to the real-time ADCIRC-Surge Guidance System (ASGS), such as a highly refined computational mesh in order to properly resolve the complicated coastal geometry of the New England coast including narrow inlets and salt ponds, improved surface wind modeling near the coast and over land and coupling of storm surge and wave models. The Precipitation-Runoff Modeling System is applied to simulate rainfall runoff for all major rivers. The New England states are especially vulnerable to inland flooding since the rivers are relatively short and high-river discharge can coincide with coastal storm surge during extreme wind and rain events. The prediction system includes 3D visualization of hazard impacts on critical infrastructure such as buildings, bridges and wastewater treatment plants. Geographic points representing specific vulnerabilities are indexed directly into the computational grids of the hazard models to provide actionable outputs that are relevant to the users in real time.